On a trip to Athens as a Fulbright scholar in 2008, Brown CS alum Peter Revesz, now a professor in the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s School of Computing with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies, remembered his conversations with the late Paris Kanellakis, a Brown CS faculty member. They ultimately led to his deciphering a series of enigmatic ancient inscriptions, including 28 Minoan Linear A texts, the Phaistos Disk, and most recently, the inscription on a 3rd-century Roman statue of a sphinx that has baffled scholars for almost two centuries.
“Once you you get people on board with the idea that we should do something about making sure our systems are fair and unbiased and accountable, the next obvious question is how do you do that?” says Professor Suresh Venkatasubramanian, who premiered CSCI 1951z, Fairness in Automated Decision-Making, last fall. “This class is really trying to answer that.”
A member of Brown CS (entered class of 1991, graduated class of 2011), Lisa Gelobter is the CEO and the founder of a tech startup called tEQuitable that uses technology to make workplaces more equitable. tEQuitable’s mission is to help companies create a safe, inclusive and equitable workplace. They provide a confidential sounding board for employees to address and resolve interpersonal conflict, specializing in micro-aggressions and micro-inequities, and they provide data and insights to companies to identify and improve systemic workplace culture issues.
In the current issue of ACM Interactions Magazine, Assistant Professor of Practice Ian Gonsher presents a collection of prototypes developed at the intersection of robotics, ubiquitous computing, mixed reality, and furniture design. These design research projects also call attention to inequalities between local and remote telepresence users, and offer viable alternatives away from the dominant paradigm of personal devices towards the development of extended reality infrastructure as a public good.
On January 24 of 2024, I attended the Computer History Museum (CHM)’s huge celebration in Silicon Valley for the 40th anniversary of the launch of the Apple Macintosh, where Brown CS got a shout-out during the two-hour program. Why would that be? I thought it would be interesting to those who weren’t around to learn about how universities – Brown in particular – were instrumental to the success of the computer that many now take for granted.
Stack Exchange is a network of question-and-answer websites on subjects in diverse fields, with each site covering a specific topic where users’ questions and answers are input into an online reputation award process. Stack Exchange website areas include knitting, electronics, and especially programming, and users are able to upvote questions and answers that feel relevant and right for them. Brown CS faculty member John Hughes was recently ranked in the top 0.21% of Stack Exchange users in the Mathematics stack exchange for his reputation in answering questions posted online.
"Pivoting is a lot of what I do," Brown CS Research Associate Tom Sgouros says of a current project. It began in a familiar research area, virtual reality, and evolved in two different directions, resulting in work that offered unexpected depths along the route to an important and often neglected goal: aiding the visually impaired.
A member of the Brown CS class of 2013, Jonah Kagan is a software engineer at VotingWorks, a small nonprofit organization dedicated to building reliable, open-source election technology like voting machines, ballot scanners, and election-auditing software. When asked about the skills he uses for his career, Kagan explained that the knowledge learned in his very first computer science class, CSCI 0190 Accelerated Introduction to Computer Science, has helped him in his day-to-day life.
